American Indian Culture and Research Journal

American Indian Historical Demography: A Review Essay with Suggestions for Future Research Russell Thornton Sherburne F. Cook. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 522 pp. $6.95 Sherburne F. Cook. The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 222 pp. $13.95 Sherburne F. Cook. The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 91 pp. $5.75 The year 1976 might very well be considered a landmark in the study of historic North American Indian populations. It was the publication date of Dobyns' Native American Historical Demography; A Critical Bibliography, Denevan's The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 and a special volume of Ethnohistory devoted to American Indian historical demography, as well as of various journal articles 4 related to this topic. It was also the year of the posthumous publication of the three books by Sherburne F. Cook discussed in this essay: The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization, The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970, and The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century. Surely, no other past year has yielded so many significant publications on historic American Indian populations. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization reprints in one volume six of Cook's essays published initially between 1940 and 1943 as separate volumes in the Ibero-Americana monograph series. The publication is significant simply by making these out-of-print essays available once again, and available widely as a single publication. The six essays forming the book are: "The Indian Versus the Spanish Mission," "The Physical and Demographic Reaction of the Nonmission Indians in Colonial and Provincial California' "The American Invasion, 1848-1870," "Trends in Marriage and Divorce since 1850," "Population Trends Among the California Mission Indians" and "The Mechanism and Extent of Dietary Adaptation Among Certain Groups of California and Nevada Indians." The first four essays focus on various aspects of Indian-white relations and conflicts and are more or less a subunit themselves; the last two essays may be seen as another subunit, complementary to the first four essays but not related directly. To varying extents, all of these six reprinted essays had achieved notoriety as pioneering efforts long before this recent publication. AlI should prove of interest and importance to contemporary scholars.